We have had the most amazing time exploring the Swain Reefs with three weeks of kind weather, perfect for exploring. Although the full cruise story will come out shortly, we have decided to write three posts to give you a glimpse of our expedition to the Southern, Central and Northern Swain Reefs. Here is the first of the trio.

What is different about the Swain Reefs is their remoteness – 250kms from Gladstone. Because of the distance from the mainland few private yachts frequent the Swains. We saw only one, although fishing charters do travel to these parts and we saw a couple at the beginning of our voyage. You are in the middle of this stunning labyrinth of reefs, floating around in a few meters of aqua water, when just a few miles out, your depth gauge does not even register… 1000m off the Continental Shelf. This is our track for the entire voyage.

The Southern Swain Reefs

Once you reach the southern tip of the Swains, the individual reefs are only a few miles from one another, separated by deep channels of 30 to 80m depth. It is like a mosaic of reefs. Some are just an oval or rectangular platform with or without an internal lagoon, offering little shelter. But a few allow you to get right inside a kind of protected U-shaped nook giving you shelter even in 20-25 knot winds. These were the ones we targetted.

5 days into our expedition, buddy catamaran Exhale, crewed by Trevor and Fiona Gill and their ship cat Barney joined us. After both boats experienced gear trouble threatening to derail our joint expedition, we managed to come together at Sweetlip Reef and from there we explored in tandem. We share a love for wild places, snorkeling, fishing and photography. They built their 40ft Grainger, have lived on and off their boat for 8 years and are resourceful, so we were well matched. It was fun to have company and good to help each other. We have satellite navigation and Predict Wind so Anui took the lead on guiding the team into reefs and route planning. They have StarLink so helped us with an internet connection when we needed it for an update to our drone software. It won’t be long until we too have this on Anui as we really missed the convenience of internet, email and phone access even though the internet detox was good.

Our satellite navigation has made it a breeze to identify those reefs that offer the best shelter from wind and swell. We anchored at 6 reefs in the southern Swains, spending one or two days at each: Hixson, Sweetlip, Sandshoe, Taiwan, Hook and Horseshoe. The most protected of these was Sandshoe, the most scenic Taiwan. Most had a half-moon or kidney shape, with the reef wall wrapping around the anchorage.

 

A striking aspect of the Swain Reefs is the abundance of fish. Nowhere in our years of reef explorations have we seen that many trout, sweetlips, emperors, mackerels etc… those species that are prized catches for eating, and nowhere else have we seen so many crays. We were assured of a sumptuous meal most nights. In fact we had to restrain ourselves so we’d have some variety in our diet!

The “pretty” fish were gorgeous too and we had many opportunities for great shots of anemonefish, filefish, tuskfish, angelfish and the smaller species which were so colourful and interesting to observe.

If the many species of fish were plentiful, the state of the coral in the Southern Reefs was disappointing and at some reefs downright depressing. Some like Taiwan and Hook were better with signs of recovery, but most add been affected by a severe COTS outbreak years ago which left them struggling to survive. Bleaching and storm damage also did not help. It takes at least 10 years for coral to regenerate. So we saw a lot of bare substrate, coral skeleton covered in algae until we reached the central  and northern reefs.

We did not do any sailing at all whilst among the Southern Swain Reefs. You can’t have both “reef hopping” weather and sailing weather! The motors got used to hop from one reef to another. But we were not too worried: calm sunny conditions, the ability to make water underway, get hot showers after dives… not much to complain about!

We have had an incredibly lucky stretch of kind weather for three weeks. We kept an eye on the wind strength and direction, with both boats interested in going to the Saumarez Reefs, another 55 nm ENE in the Coral Sea. But it did not eventuate. Having met a Marine Park Survey Boat at Horseshoe Reef who told us to keep going north to see healthier coral, we took their advice and proceeded to the Central Reefs which will be the subject of our next post. The third post in the series will focus on the Northern Swains and our return to the coast.

Thank you to those of you who commented on the posts we had scheduled before going offshore. We are now in catch up mode, back inshore and contactable!